How to Format a Hard Drive With a CD

Video Transcript

"Hi I am Ron Chase with pahrumpauctions.com located in Pahrump, Nevada. This is my shop come on in. Occasionally you may find that you want to wipe out your hard drive completely. The best way to do that is to format your hard drive. Remember though that when you format a hard drive you do lose all the information that is stored on the hard drive. So make sure you have a back up under my documents folders or anything else, pictures of your family. Because basically your hard drive will be completely lost after the format. The easiest way to do this is to get a Windows XP disk either home or pro. Simply insert the disk into your disk drive, and reboot your computer. As your computer begins to reboot there will be an option for you to boot from hard drive or boot from CD. Select your option to boot from the CD. This will allow the Windows XP CD to run, and give you an option of deleting the partitions on your hard drive, and formatting it. After the CD loads the programs that you need to format your hard drive you will see your available partitions and hard drive listed. Choose drive C, which is your main hard drive, and the press the D key. This will allow Windows to change the partition size, and start the reformatting process. After this step you will be back on the same screen, but it will now show C drive with some numbers behind it, and a large space that is un-formatting your unpartitioned. You can now select that drive, choose what partition size you want, the default is the entire drive, and then select format. Congratulations you have now formatted your hard drive, and you will have lost everything on there that you did not back up."